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Show HN: Filling PDF forms with AI using client-side tool calling

copilot.simplepdf.com

21–30 of 38 posts

Re: Show HN: Filling PDF forms with AI using client-side tool calling

#21
This looks interesting, I’m looking for a good personal PDF editor that I can use in windows and private.

Seems like your product is more for organizations, any idea if such a thing exists. It seems like the market is full of bloated (Adobe/foxit) or not properly working editors.

Re: Show HN: Filling PDF forms with AI using client-side tool calling

#22

This looks interesting, I’m looking for a good personal PDF editor that I can use in windows and private. Seems like your product is more for organizations, any idea if such a thing exists. It seems like the market is full of bloated (Adobe/foxit) or not properly working editors.

We offer both:

- A privacy-focused PDF editor, free for individuals, used by 200k users monthly: https://simplepdf.com/editor

- The same editor, embeddable into one’s app for companies, with the same privacy guarantees (everything happens in the browser) + the resulting PDF is stored in their own storage (« bring your own storage »).

The majority of our paid customers are in healthcare where privacy is non-negotiable. Co-pilot extends that to the AI world (« bring your own AI »)

What are you using the PDF editor for?

Re: Show HN: Filling PDF forms with AI using client-side tool calling

#24
post #22

This looks interesting, I’m looking for a good personal PDF editor that I can use in windows and private. Seems like your product is more for organizations, any idea if such a thing exists. It seems like the market is full of bloated (Adobe/foxit) or not properly working editors.

We offer both: - A privacy-focused PDF editor, free for individuals, used by 200k users monthly: https://simplepdf.com/editor - The same editor, embeddable into one’s app for companies, with the same privacy guarantees (everything happens in the browser) + the resulting PDF is stored in their own storage (« bring your own storage »). The majority of our paid customers are in healthcare where privacy is non-negotiable…

I hope this doesn't sound insulting but how is this different than Preview or Adobe Acrobat?

Re: Show HN: Filling PDF forms with AI using client-side tool calling

#26
I managed to do this locally with Claude and some python libraries. Claude looked over the PDF, found the fields, and wrote a python script to insert data at the appropriate locations. Sure it took some futzing to get everything to line up properly, but as other's have said, my PDF wasn't sent to a remote server

Re: Show HN: Filling PDF forms with AI using client-side tool calling

#28
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We offer both: - A privacy-focused PDF editor, free for individuals, used by 200k users monthly: https://simplepdf.com/editor - The same editor, embeddable into one’s app for companies, with the same privacy guarantees (everything happens in the browser) + the resulting PDF is stored in their own storage (« bring your own storage »). The majority of our paid customers are in healthcare where privacy is non-negotiable…

I hope this doesn't sound insulting but how is this different than Preview or Adobe Acrobat?

Absolutely not insulting! In fact an excellent question!

Preview was an inspiration when I started SimplePDF, my goal was to make the "Preview" of the web, so that people without a Mac would benefit from a software matching Preview in ease of use and overall polish.

Adobe Acrobat: SimplePDF has "Simple" in the name as the philosophy is to keep it simple (both in ease of use, and features): I don't intend to support everything that Adobe Acrobat does. There's a lot of features that I could build that I intentionally do not, as they would bloat the UI and hard the overall usability. Most people have very simple needs and don't need advanced features (like scripting, etc).

Re: Show HN: Filling PDF forms with AI using client-side tool calling

#29
post #4

Might be worth making it clearer that the chat messages are going to a remote server. So any PII data is leaving the local machine.

I tried to make it clear with the popup message that appears when you start chatting: "Public demo. Use sample data only. Messages are processed by the selected AI provider." But you're right that it's not as evident as I wanted to, I'm making a small copy update to make it clearer: "Public demo. Your chat messages leave your device and are sent to the selected AI provider. Use sample data only." (Since there's suppo…

Embed a small llm with wasm so it's all private. Maybe make an api so when the os has a local llm it will use that eventually

Re: Show HN: Filling PDF forms with AI using client-side tool calling

#30

In the chat box I typed my SSN is "123-45-6789". It filled it in in the wrong box (4 Exemptions). What problem is this solving? Isn't it easy enough to just click in the correct box and type the values? How does this compare to Claude Cowork?

I think the demo LLM is quite small and perhaps too dumb
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